


Artificial

by Adaris



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Dark!Kepler, Desolation!Jacobi, Gen, No Not You Two, Someone Help Maxwell, The Fifteenth Entity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-07 17:22:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18237959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adaris/pseuds/Adaris
Summary: The first avatar of the fifteenth entity awakens.





	Artificial

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Spider and His Firefly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18180467) by [LiterallyThePresident](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiterallyThePresident/pseuds/LiterallyThePresident). 



> I haven't been able to stop thinking about Maxwell as an avatar of the fifteenth entity, which was described as a mechanical/man-made fear. She'd totally rock it. Desolation!Jacobi sort of explains himself. My reasoning for Dark!Kepler is that it would be goddamn terrifying to hear him laughing in the dark. And he keeps people in the dark even if it's a terrible idea, his job is hiding in the shadows, and if you remember Tucked In... that's him.

She never takes her first breath. Her eyes open and focus on the slightly waterstained ceiling of her apartment, but she never feels the need to breathe. The bluish glow of a computer screen illuminates the room around her; empty bags of microwave rice, dirty, wadded-up laundry, and broken electronics. 

She stands up and moves to stretch, but catches herself—her right arm is made of smooth, burnished metal, accented with blinking lights and humming mechanical parts. They whirr and click as she flexes her fingers, but the movement is so smooth she can't tell the difference between her arm and… what had her arm used to look like? She looks at her left arm, which is strange and pink and _wrong_ , but it's hers too, and she can't shake the feeling that maybe she was supposed to look like that. 

"What's happening to—" Her voice is too smooth, processed, like a voiceover, like—like a machine. "—me?" She presses a hand to her throat as she speaks and doesn't feel the buzz of vocal cords. "How can I—why can I—"

Too many questions. There aren't any answers, not in her memories, but she does have one other source of information that is always more reliable. She turns to her computer, but finds that most of its parts have been ripped out completely, leaving an empty shell with only a working screen. Did she do that?

Either way, she'll need to find another computer. She moves towards the door, one leg mechanical, movement smooth and graceful, the other leg slightly sore, shaking, human, making her stagger across the room until she manages to balance herself out. 

The door is locked, but she puts her right hand against the lock and it clatters to the floor in a dozen pieces. She steps out of the apartment building into a cool, grey city. Cars, bicycles, steel girders, glass, asphalt, the lights sparkling in the urban smog—she can taste polychlorinated biphenyls in the air, and it makes her smile.

She walks over to the nearest car and puts her hand on the window; the driver's side door folds away, glass and all, so she can access the radio. Without looking, she knows it's connected to the internet, and she reaches through the connection to all of the information roiling just out of reach; she feels the gaze of a distant watcher, noticing her and cataloguing her, but it's almost irrelevant. She needs to know what she is, what her directive is. But there is nothing like her, not even in the mind of the distant watcher. She pulls back and crosses her mismatched arms, glaring at the screen. 

"Doctor Alana Maxwell?"

She spares a glance for the squishy organic thing squawking at her, then folds the door back down to keep it away. 

The organic creature puts its chubby hand on the door, and the metal melts to the ground in a splash of molten steel. "C'mon, even I know that was rude."

With a huff, she turns away from the thing and keeps her gaze fixed on the radio screen. 

"Aw, aren't you even a bit curious?" it whines. "I thought the door melting thing was pretty cool. It impresses a lot of other people."

She closes her eyes and then finally asks, "What are you?"

"Me? Oh, you know, demolitions expert, very enthusiastic pyromaniac, whatever. But you can call me Daniel Jacobi." It smiles at her. "Just another avatar of the Desolation, at your service."

"What—what am I?" Her fingers dig into the crystal surface of the screen, moving through it and into the electronics behind; radio broadcasts spark through her thoughts in a swirl of static and chatter. 

"Isn't that the million dollar question?" another organic thing asks rhetorically; it's taller than the first one, and darkness seems to cling to it, making it difficult to see. "We're all very curious."

She carefully exits the car to examine the organic creatures more closely. They seem to be sentient, or at least, very good at faking it. Even though their organic parts are rotting as they speak, always a step closer to dying, becoming just another corpse. They're different shades of flesh, but still meat all the same. She knows the entity made of meat and she hates it, so messy, so… juicy. The ones that they serve are no better; an all-consuming flame burning the world to ash, a darkness drowning thought and memory.

Hers is a pure power, crafted from metal, made to work in unerring automated synchronization; she is the newest of a new generation, and she will last forever, because she is the one thing all of them are not. 

She curls her mechanical fingers into a fist, feeling the parts move against each other in perfect concert, the electricity in the wires around her, the cameras, the stoplights, the smart watches, the phones, the airplanes cutting through the Vast, the heavy taste of carbon dioxide growing ever thicker as coal plants far away burn ancient trees to create new things of pure steel and plastic that will twist apart the natural world until only she remains because—

"I am artificial."


End file.
